Daily Expenses of Foreign Tourists, Length of Stay and Activities: Evidence from Spain

Abstract

One of the most salient topics in tourism studies is the analysis of factors driving tourist expenditure decisions, given their impact on destinations and the consequences for marketing strategies. Tourist expenditure in a given destination is the result of considering both the length of stay and the daily expenditure. The objective of this research is to analyse daily tourist expenditure determinants using a survey of foreign tourists visiting one leading destination in Southern Europe: the Spanish Mediterranean coast. It focuses on two aspects: how the length of stay influences daily expenditure and how the different activities of tourists during their stay affect tourist expenditure. The research employs a dataset of nearly 184,000 observations covering 2004-2009 and includes tourist socio-economic characteristics and elements related to the trip. The results confirm that tourist expenditure is explained by a set of tourist-related social and economic factors and these factors shed light on the consequences of strategies to extend the length of stay of tourists. Finally, the effect on the daily expenditure of tourists' activities helps to determine the complementary supply (health, culture, gastronomy, etc) that must accompany mature sun-and-sand destinations.

Economic effects of tourism and its influencing factors

“…hotels) is generally economically most relevant, followed by rented apartments, with campgrounds and friends/relatives generating the lowest expenditures (e.g. Agarwal, Yochum 1999;Fredman 2008;García-Sánchez et al 2013). Interestingly, Kastenholz (2007) found camping tourists to be the heaviest spenders in nature tourism destinations in Portugal, and Kozak et al (2008) reported a negative relationship between hotel accommodation and spending in Turkey, which might be explained by the sun-and-sand character of the destination.…”

Recreational angling tournaments: participants' expenditures

“…Previous research has diered on the nature of the impact of group size on expenditure (Wynen, 2013;García-Sánchez et al, 2013) but the analysis in this instance nds the impact is negligible. Had the group size coecient been positive and statistically signicant there would have been a policy implication that tournament organisers target participation by groups of anglers if local economic impact was a tournament objective.…”

“…In analyses of tourist expenditure a range of eects were found, including evidence of an inverted Ushape relationship (García-Sánchez et al, 2013) and that younger compared to older tourists were higher spenders (Cini and Saayman, 2014). In the case of sports expenditure neither Eakins (2016) in the case of Ireland nor Lera-López et al (2011) nd a signicant eect of age on expenditure.…”

“…Wynen (2013) nd that there is a higher propensity to spend as tourist group size increases up to a certain point, after which the opposite is the case. On the other hand García-Sánchez et al (2013) nd that expenditure is higher among tourists travelling alone or in small groups and suggest that there are scale economies in the group size. We include a dummy variable indicating whether the angler participated in the tournament as part of a group to investigate whether there is a group eect on expenditure.…”

An almost ideal demand system (AIDS) analysis of Korean travelers' summer holiday travel expenditure patterns

“…Mok and Iverson () also found that daily travel expenditure decreased when the number of travel companions increased. García‐Sánchez et al () examined factors driving tourist expenditure decisions using a dataset of approximately 184,000 tourists on the Spanish Mediterranean coast and found that group size had an important effect on daily travel expenditure: Traveling alone increased expenditure when compared with a reference group of four people. Thrane and Farstad (), on the other hand, reported possible nonlinearities in the relationship between travel expenditures and travel party size.…”